Cute terms that doctors use

Since my nursing days back in the 70s, I’ve always been tickled by the capacity of our medical doctors as wordsmiths, coming up with words to describe every situation in which they find themselves as medical practitioners. Two that have struck as of more than passing amusement are “idiopathic” and “iatrogenic”, used when we talk about aetiology (causes of illness or disease). The former (I first heard it in relation to idiopathic epilepsy), refers to illnesses simply “of unknown origin”. In other words, if you have a problem, and we don’t know what’s causing it, we describe it as “idiopathic” in origin. Iatrogenic is the term applied to the kind of illness or disease that is caused by the ministrations of the physicians themselves – when I carry out a particular procedure and it results in illness or disease, we preface the description with “iatrogenic” (although not too many doctors I know are keen to use the term). I raise this, dear reader, as a kind of preliminary blog to the next blog I’m writing, because I’m currently recovering from iatrogenic septicaemia. More, I’m suffering effects exacerbated by the failure of several “nurse specialists” to properly deal with my condition.